By: Ali Hope

 Enugu – Agbani – The Vice-Chancellor of Enugu State University of Technology (ESUT), Professor Aloysius-Michaels Okolie has made a passionate plea to the National Universities Commission (NUC) accreditation team, imploring them to approach the crucial exercise as a peer review mechanism aimed at improvement rather than punitive action. The VC stressed the immense pressure on the team, who are the first of 23 programmes slated for accreditation in the 2025/2026 academic cycle.

The VC made the call NUC Accreditation teams paid him a courtesy visit in his office during the week.

The Vice-Chancellor used his welcome address to the NUC team to lay bare the turbulence facing the Nigerian university system, including the ongoing fallout from the recent ASUU strike, which he acknowledged as a fight for a just cause. He confessed that the NUC itself was in “serious problem” trying to adjust the accreditation schedule after the interruptions.

The VC emphasized the critical nature of the initial visit, warning that a poor result would create a “nasty” domino effect that would “flow down to the other 21 programmes.” He reminded departments under review, Architecture and Mass Communication, of their historical strength, noting that the latter had previously scored over 70 percent.

To ensure continuous readiness, the university has adopted a unique, proactive funding measure: allocating ₦10,000 from every school fee paid into a dedicated “accreditation account” for constant facility upliftment and repairs.

Acknowledging the persistent challenge of underfunding in public universities, the VC lauded the intervention of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) for helping to improve infrastructure. He highlighted significant investments in the university’s library, noting that millions of books are now available online through subscriptions like EBSCO and Terra, ensuring students and faculty have access to global resources.

While the VC joked that the Mass Communication Department’s biggest problem was having too many students subscribing, he voiced serious concern for the Insurance and Risks Management programme, which suffers from low enrollment across Nigerian universities. He appealed to the NUC experts to use their experience to offer recommendations on how to attract more students, stating it would be a “suicide” to strike out the program.

The Vice-Chancellor concluded with an open-door policy, challenging the team to point out any deficiencies they could fix within their arrival and promising a proactive, bureaucracy-free response from the university team. He referenced a religious metaphor of forgiveness, stating the NUC team was there to help, not to “vilify us or punish us.”

Already, Mass Communication, Insurance and Risks management and Public Administration Departments have undergone accreditation in the last six days